1. He was born in New York City, where he got his start
in politics.

Lew grew up in a middle-class apartment in Forrest Hills, Queens,
where he started taking up causes like building low-income
housing, according to The New York Times.

At 12 years of age, he campaigned in New York for Sen. Eugene
McCarthy's presidential campaign.

''Pretty exciting for a 12-year-old,'' Lew told the Times in 1999. ''It was also my
introduction to seeing that you could make a difference in
people's lives through politics.''

2. He started his education at Carleton College in
Minnesota.

He ended up getting a degree from Harvard. Later, while in
Washington, he picked up a law degree from Georgetown by
attending classes at night.

3. He 'grew up' while working for Speaker Tip O'Neill in
the 80s.

Lew began his time Washington in 1973 as
legislative aide on Capitol Hill, including as a domestic policy
adviser to former House Speaker Tip O'Neill when Ronald Reagan
was President. He worked in an office with MSNBC's Chris
Matthews.

“When he said ‘Pell grants,’ it wasn’t something distant or
numerical,” Matthews told the Times. “He knew this meant kids
could go to college who didn’t have rich parents.”

As an aide, he helped negotiate a deal to reform Social
Security in 1983.

4. He was a Special Assistant and the OMB director under
President Clinton.

From February 1993 to October 1994, Lew served as a Special
Assistant to the President in the Clinton administration. After a
hiatus, he returned to the White House in 1995 as the Deputy
Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In 1998, he was
promoted to be the Director of the OMB.

Lew played a key role in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997,
which helped Clinton leave office having created a
surplus.

5. He held a variety of positions between the Clinton and
Obama administrations.

Most prominently, he gained his only experience on Wall
Street as a managing director at Citigroup beginning in 2006.
After his appointment to the Obama administration in 2010,
he caught some fire — especially from
liberals — for the stint.

Citi paid Lew $1.1 million for his year at
Alternative Investments, according to an ethics disclosure report
filed in January 2009. He was also eligible for an undisclosed
bonus. Lew did not immediately return a call for comment.

His unit, though, lost as much as billions of dollars in 2008 as
its bets turned sour. In the first quarter of 2008 alone the unit
lost $509 million; the company stopped publicly disclosing the
unit's individual numbers soon thereafter, but the part of the
company that absorbed Alternative Investments lost $20.1 billion
in 2008, according to the bank's filings with the Securities and
Exchange Commission.

White House via
Flickr

6. He spent time in the State Department before joining
Obama's cabinet.

He was the Deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton for nearly two years
before Obama tapped him to replace Peter Orszag as the Director of the OMB. That
was where he first outlined the administration's
deficit-reduction proposal, including returning to
Clinton-era tax rates on the top 2 percent of incomes. In the
2012 budget, he also proposed $400 billion in savings
through non-security discretionary spending freezes
and $78 billion in defense cuts while lowering corporate tax
rates to 25 percent.

“I describe budgets as a tapestry: When it’s woven together, the
picture amounts to our hopes and dreams of a nation.”

7. He was promoted to Chief of Staff in early
2012.

Obama replaced outgoing Bill Daley with Jack Lew last January,
when criticism on Lew's Citigroup tenure started to intensify.
Along with Director of Legislative Affairs Rob Nabors, Lew
immediately became one of Obama's most-trusted allies and took a
leading role in the debt-ceiling negotiations of 2011. NPR detailed how some of his forward-thinking steps
gave the White House the edge in the fiscal cliff talks this
year:

"The White House was very forward-looking and strategic in the
way they shaped the sequester," [former economic adviser to Vice
President Joe Biden Jared] Bernstein says. "This is a
very tough situation for Republicans, in no small part because of
the skill of the negotiators from the Democrats' side."

For instance, in making sure that programs like Medicare, Pell
grants or food stamps are not on the chopping block when the
automatic spending cuts hit. Instead, it's defense spending and
the Bush-era tax cuts that are at risk — things that are
Republican priorities.

Bernstein says Lew gets a lot of the credit for that.

"Jack Lew's fingerprints are all over the parts of this sequester
that protect vulnerable people, whether it's exempting the
entitlements or many of the things that help low-income
families," he says. "One of the things Jack always deeply
understood was just how important that role of government is for
people who are retirees, for people who are poor, for people who
aren't connected to the economy and the market in the way that a
lot of Republicans envision everybody is, but they're really
not."

If confirmed, Lew will be tasked again with leading the Obama
team in talks on the next round of fiscal issues — the debt
ceiling (again), the sequester and the appropriations budget.

8. Conservatives and Republicans really dislike
him.

Politico's Manu Raju detailed why some Republicans could look
to block his appointment — because, quite simply, they do not
like his views or how he negotiates.

“No one was more prepared and more in tune with the numbers
than Jack Lew. He was always very polite and respectful in his
tone and someone who I can tell is very committed to his
principles.”

But now, Republicans say they feel that Lew has no interest
in "hearing GOP concerns." It comes after Lew reportedly scoffed
at a GOP proposal to make the estate tax rate permanent.

"We’ve got to have a person who has credibility with the
leaders of the American and world economy, someone who has
credibility with the Congress, and I would feel like Mr. Lew’s
nomination would be a mistake," Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions told
Politico.

9. He doesn't believe deregulation of Wall Street led to
the financial collapse.